Dear Bill Gates: You Are Cool

Last night, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates made his first appearance on The Colbert Report to talk about his philanthropic work around the globe. Stephen Colbert asked the billionaire if it bothered him that the late Steve Jobs was considered cooler than Gates.

"Does it ever bug you?," Colberg asked.

"He was always cooler than me," Gates responded. "He was brilliant and he had his own approach. Mine, I guess, was a little geekier than his was."

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But we can't let big him continue to peddle that line. Can he really be okay with it? Even so, this is far from a cut-and-dry case. Call us crazy, but it is not impossible to argue that Gates is actually cooler than Jobs ever was. Herewith, a 5-point plan to change his mind before the next time someone asks that question:

1. He's a better father. Admittedly, not much has been written about Gates's relationship with his three children. But Jobs is on record as being, at least at the beginning, a lousy father to his daughter, Lisa, a product of his relationship with Chrisann Brennan. (Brennan and Jobs weren't married.) Jobs visited Lisa three days after her birth, but then didn't offer any financial assistance to mother and child, who were living on welfare, until the County of San Mateo "sued Jobs and get him to take financial responsibility," writes Walter Isaacson in his biography of the Apple founder.

2. Generosity is cool. In 2000, Gates and his wife, Melinda, founded the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and have devoted billions of dollars toward polio eradication, fighting disease including AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria. While Steve Jobs donated to hospitals and helped begin the Bono-led RED campaign to fight AIDS, his record hardly measures up to Gates's. Jobs was "generally dismissive of philanthropic endeavors," Isaacson writes, and he shuttered Apple's charity projects.

3. Gates has a bigger yacht. His 200-footer, the Goygpus, isn't as hefty as his Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen's 400-foot-plus Octopus but it's no slouch. Jobs's yacht, a 78-footer named Venus, wasn't finished by the time he passed away.

4. Bill Gates has been jailed for speeding. Not exactly Brando in The Wild One, but still. Many years ago, he used to race his Porsche 911 through the New Mexico desert. After one escapade, Paul Allen had to bail him out of jail.

5. Gates dropped out of Harvard. But then again, Jobs dropped out of Reed. And considering that Mark Zuckerberg, the mortal enemy of cool, also dropped out of Harvard, here perhaps the edge has to go to Jobs.